Thursday, June 27, 2019

The intellectual quality of 'Right' and 'Left' today

[The broad category of individuals listed here would be something like "public intellectual figures influential on contemporary mainstream American cultural and political thought."]

For the time being, I'll just drop this list of names and then explain later how the collected efforts of the 'Right' figures can easily wipe the floor with the collection of 'Left' figures listed.  I mean, isn't it obvious to anyone who's done his homework?  (Hint: which side has more overall aggregate wisdom?  [For instance, only one side has authors of books titled: The Book of Virtues; The Road to Character.]  It's a no-brainer, much like how a Golden State Warriors team with a healthy Curry and Durant wipes the floor with otherwise pretty skilled teams.  I'm sorry to say that I don't think that the "left" side rises to the level of the 2017-2018 Houston Rockets in this analogy, because it really isn't close.  The left side is more like a .500 team pretending it's an .800 [66-win] team.  The .900+ [74-8] team on the merits would be Aristotelians-Randians.)  And we're not even listing the not-so-influential but some vastly superior libertarian and Objectivist thinkers.

(I am more closely familiar with the 'Right' stream of American thought and so there are more of them listed; I list only living people with one exception; I leave out those currently working in prominent government positions.)

Republicans / Right:

Walter Williams
Thomas Sowell
Richard Epstein
Roger Scruton
Glenn Beck
Bill O'Reilly
Krauthammer (d. 2018)
Kissinger
George Will
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity
Michael Savage
Ben Shapiro
Mark Levin
Dennis Prager
Tucker Carlson
Greg Gutfeld
Newt Gingrich
Dinesh D'Souza
Bret Stephens
David Brooks
David Horowitz
Jason Riley
Heather Mac Donald
Peggy Noonan
Dana Perino
Jesse Watters
Dennis Miller
Jeanine Pirro
Dan Bongino
Candace Owens
Milo Y
Karl Rove
Brit Hume
Jonah Goldberg
Pat Buchanan
Lou Dobbs
Ann Coulter
James Dobson
Michael Medved
William Bennett
Robert Bork
George Gilder
Charles Murray
Andrew Napolitano
John Stossel
Victor Davis Hanson
Rod Dreher
Ross Douthat


Democrats / Left:

Jon Stewart
Stephen Colbert
Chris Cuomo
Rachel Maddow
Cenk Uygur
Chris Matthews
Matthew Yglesias
Paul Krugman
Joseph Stiglitz
Alan Blinder
William Galston
Austan Goolsbee
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Michael Eric Dyson
Cornel West
Noam Chomsky
Jurgen Habermas
Naomi Klein
Slavoj Zizek
Robert Reich
Juan Williams
Michael Moore
Thom Hartmann
Jesse Jackson
Al Sharpton
Al Franken
Bill Moyers
Matt Taibbi
David Brock
Nathan J. Robinson
Nicholas Kristof
Al Gore


Independent/Other:

Jordan Peterson
Andrew Sullivan
Glenn Greenwald
Alan Dershowitz
Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman
Fareed Zakaria
The Economist (no bylines)
Steven Pinker
Joe Rogan
Bill Maher
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Sam Harris
Richard Dawkins
Peter Singer
Martha Nussbaum
Amartya Sen
Judith Butler